Highlights from the Archives

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood won the 2000 Booker Prize tonight for ''The Blind Assassin,'' a novel in which the reminiscences of an elderly woman serve as the starting point for an intricate series of stories within stories.

During a recent visit to New York for the publication of her new novel, ''The Blind Assassin,'' Margaret Atwood spoke about a great aunt who, toward the end of her life, was blind and an invalid. When relatives asked her what she thought about during her long, solitary days, she answered, ''I'm lying here writing the story of my life, and when I come to the end I will close the book.''

When Margaret Atwood was in Zurich several years ago on a book-promotion tour, she had a sudden, inexplicable visitation. Looking out a window of her hotel, she thought about Grace Marks, who in 1843 at the age of 16 had been convicted of murdering her employer and his mistress. This was one of Canada's most famous criminal cases, and for the author it had become something of an obsession.

The President and Congress have been assassinated by right-wing religious fanatics who have set up a monotheocratic dictatorship based on biblical principles in a land they now call Gilead. Women may no longer possess jobs, or property, or money of any kind. Pollution has sharply reduced fertility, and certain women, selected for their ability to breed, have become slaves - Handmaids -forced to try to conceive through joyless copulation in bizarre menages a trois with their Commanders and the Commanders' barren wives. Thus begins the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's controversial and critically acclaimed new novel, ''The Handmaid's Tale.''

Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson are the latest authors to be commissioned by Penguin Random House’s Hogarth imprint to write their interpretations of plays by Shakespeare, the publisher is to announce on Monday.